Gamification can be leveraged to uplevel a brand’s marketing strategy—creating engaging, novelty experiences that captivate the end user. The use of game design elements, in traditionally non-gaming contexts, creates an interactive experience that is unique and memorable. Immersive, gamified experiences have been proven to boost shopper engagement, increase time spent with your brand and deepen consumer relationships with your products and services.
By tapping into the psychological principles of gamification, like competition, achievement and recognition, brands and retailers can captivate shoppers with custom branded experiences. Custom gamification as a marketing strategy enables brands and retailers to retain customer loyalty and increase retention, gain robust consumer insights and increase brand education.
Customer Loyalty and Retention
Brands and retailers can utilize custom mini-games to simultaneously create memorable brand experiences, and encourage customers to return and engage with your brand more often. Using game-like rewards and challenges can incentivize long-term engagement and retention by tapping into consumers’ natural drive for competition, achievement and recognition.
Korean beauty brand, Laneige, incorporated gaming elements into their Virtual World prompting users to discover numerous products, the brand’s scientific background and marketing campaign assets. The featured Scavenger Hunt game encouraged users to explore the experience in order to find hidden icons, leading to a reward upon completion: a 5-piece gift with purchase.
Gain Consumer Insights
Gamification methods, such as product recommendation quizzes, provide rich zero-party data by capturing direct feedback from customers, offering detailed insights into their preferences, needs and behaviors that can fine-tune your marketing and product development strategy.
Obsess brand partner, Olaplex, utilized branded quizzes to gain zero-party data in their Virtual Salon with their Hair Diagnostic questionnaire; the interactive quiz provided users with a curated hair regimen full of the brand’s products, based on their answers. By filling out the questionnaire, consumers are providing the brand with data they otherwise would not have, allowing Olaplex to capture in-depth information on what their audience is looking for.
Immersive gamified experiences also enable brands to capture robust first-party data such as in-scene behavior. Brands are able to access information such as which product displays are the most appealing, and what their most popular offerings are based on how shoppers engage with different products and pages.
Increased Brand Education
Immersing shoppers into your virtual world helps with brand education and recall. Virtual stores and experiences are a unique and memorable forum for you to host educational content around your brand’s story and offerings. Including custom gamification, such as interactive quizzes and games, simplifies complex product details and campaigns, and turns them into engaging experiences that help your customers retain key information about your brand.
For example, in honor of J.Crew’s 40th anniversary the classic American fashion retailer partnered with Obsess to release a Virtual Beach House. The immersive flagship experience showcased the brand’s products in classic J.Crew print-themed rooms, and commemorated the brand’s heritage with exclusive content and custom gamification such as the Catalog Cover Pop Quiz where users were encouraged to test their J.Crew knowledge. The fashion brand later refreshed their Virtual World to celebrate their holiday campaign, aligning with their marketing calendar.
Gamification is a powerful brand marketing tool that brands and retailers can use to uplevel their strategy. Explore gamification in Obsess-powered experiences and learn how innovative brands like yours can deploy gamification tactics into your marketing strategy. To talk to one of our specialists, email us at contact@obsessvr.com or book a demo.
